by Ninie Hammon
“Han nah.”
Malachi found it, listed right below the boy’s name.
“Red Rover, Red Rover,” Malachi called in a loud firm voice, “let Hannah Elizabeth Whitt come over.”
There was no shock this time. The mass of creatures was as still now as if they’d been carved from stone. But the sense of struggle was even more intense. Malachi noticed then that the light around them was … different. When he’d first seen it, the impossible black light with sparkles in it had covered the whole of them in a thick, malevolent blanket. Now, that darkness was behind them, a single impossibly black light that pulsed like a heartbeat in the gloom.
With only the briefest hesitation, another creature, one that had not been very large to begin with, began to shrink as it advanced. It became a little girl with hair in her face, her ratty skirt dragging on the ground. She went directly to the little boy and reached out her hand. This time, it was Sam who let go of the little boy’s hand so he could take the small hand of his little sister.
Now the five of them faced the others.
Malachi searched the list for the same last name.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, let Ruth Ann Whitt come over.”
She was maybe five years old. Her hair might once have been red.
The darkness throbbed. Malachi could feel the pressure in his ears. The pressure built, like going down in water, deeper and deeper. Great power was pulsing, struggling against the small creatures as they pulled away.
After the Whitts, the Campbells — a girl and two boys came to stand between Sam and Charlie.
The Lancasters, two girls.
When Malachi called out, Frances Grace Biddle, Sam gasped. Before the child reached her, she let go the hand of the child next to her and reached out both her hands to the approaching little girl. She took Sam’s hands and Sam stood there for a moment, holding on, looking into the child’s face, maybe into her eyes. Maybe she had eyes still.
Instead of joining the line, the little girl turned back to the pulsing mass and stood. Waiting.
“Her sister,” Sam called to Malachi in what might have been a loud voice, but the sound was almost inaudible in his ears. “Her twin — Hope.”
“Hope Abigail Biddle,” Malachi called, and another creature joined the first one standing in front of Sam. They grasped hands with each other before they joined the line.
Then the game continued.
The Southwicks, three boys and a little girl, the smallest of all the children. Just a toddler.
With every one, there was a struggle of tremendous proportions. The pulling away was like a moon in the orbit of a planet, fighting to fly out into the darkness of the rest of the universe.
As the number of the creatures diminished, the brightness of the black light pulsing behind them faded. But in some way Malachi couldn’t have articulated, he was certain that the dimmer light was growing more and more malevolent, more intense as its glow decreased.
Finally, there were two creatures left, but three names on the list. Malachi shot a questioning look at Sam, but she didn’t see. So he called out to Lydia Faith Mullins … and Matthew Isaac Mullins to “come over.”
A creature moved forward and it became obvious that it was not one being at all but two. One of them was a baby the other cradled in her arms.
One last child now stood. Alone.
Malachi opened his mouth to call out the name and the pressure in his ears threatened to burst his eardrums.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, let Daniel Paul Dunn come over.”
The darkness quivered, quaked like jello struck with a fork. A word formed in Malachi’s mind, and from the surprised looks on Charlie and Sam’s faces, it must have formed in theirs, too.
An anguished cry, Danny!
Then the final form separated from the mass and crossed the distance between them, that somehow managed to feel like a thousand miles, across a chasm of infinite depth. Malachi took the boy’s hand, knew his face was freckled, remembered that it was, but he could find no trace of them.
Malachi had called out to all the children who’d died horrible deaths together in that cave more than two hundred years ago. They stood with him, Charlie and Sam now, facing a presence that they had left behind, a form in the almost complete darkness. It was an angry, bitter force, powered by rage, a boiling, bubbling caldron of hate. And even Malachi could feel its pull. A magnetic force, grasping, straining with all its will to drag back to itself what had separated from it.
And furious that it couldn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Stuart stared in wonder as Jolene roared past him and Cotton and aimed his car like a battering ram at the advancing creatures. She hit Reece Tibbits square, a perfect shot, knocked his body up into the air before it crashed down on the hood of the car. She didn’t stop there, just plowed ahead, striking one … two, three, more of the other creatures, running over them or knocking them out of the way before there was the awful sound of metal striking something solid. The back of the car rose up into the air as the front crumpled around … a tree stump. She’d hit one of the tree stumps.
As Stuart stood gawking, the driver’s side door opened and Jolene fell out of it onto the ground. Getting to her feet, she staggered, fell, and lunged up again and then ran back toward where he and Cotton stood. He opened his arms and she crashed into them, knocking him backwards, and he let her slide off him to the ground.
They were still coming.
The bones!
“Jolene,” he said without turning from the advancing creatures. “Get the sacks, dump the bones into the grave.” Adding urgently, “Now! Do it now!”
He almost followed with, “We’ll hold them off” until he saw the headless body of Reece Tibbits lurching in their direction. The holding-them-off part probably wasn’t possible. No, absolutely wasn’t possible. They could delay, though. He was sure … he hoped they could delay the creatures. Keep them … busy long enough for Jolene to get the bones into the hole he had dug for them in the earth.
He turned back toward the advancing creatures, while Jolene staggered to the leaf bags, grabbed the first one and began to empty the contents into the hole in the ground at her feet. The creature out in front now was an older woman. She had white hair, but that was all he could tell about her — she’d been one of the bodies Jolene had run over, and there wasn’t enough left of the features on her face for her own mother to recognize who she was.
Close behind her was the pregnant woman Stuart knew must be Becky Sue Potter.
She named it Marilee. Marilee because she liked it and Winona because that was her aunt’s name. The baby didn’t breathe. Never got a chance to breathe. It didn’t stop breathing like the others did. Just stopped, not choked, just … stopped.
In a suddenly-old house down the road from Cotton Jackson’s, Moses Weiss had spoken to the spirit of this woman, who was mourning the loss of a baby that never had a chance to draw breath.
Somewhere in his heart, Stuart managed to be grateful that this … creature was dead, had been long dead before the baby who’d never breathed had been … before Jolene crashed into her with his car.
He raised the pick over his head as the old woman approached. Tried not to conjure up what would happen when he hit her with it. It wouldn’t stop her. She’d keep coming. They all would, overpower him and Cotton by sheer numbers.
As soon as she was within striking range, Stuart slammed the pick down into the top of her head. It split open like a cantaloupe and the death smell of the rot inside turned his stomach and he reflexively heaved, would have vomited but the woman with the pick in her head was on him then, clawing at his face with yellowed fingernails, scrambling to get her fingers around his throat.
He had body-slammed Reece Tibbits that day in his house, knocked him off his feet … but hadn’t actually touched him … hadn’t felt the cold Jolene had described feeling in the fingers that encircled her throat. He felt it now. Cold fingers with unimaginable strengt
h closed on his neck, an iron band that instantly began to squeeze.
Suddenly, Jolene made some kind of sound, a cry, garbled, without form. He cut his eyes toward her as he staggered backward, pulling with all his strength to loosen the grip on his neck. Jolene had just dumped one of the bags of bones into the hole and had picked up a second, about to turn it up and pour out the contents, but had stopped, and now sat on her knees staring at the hillside that Cotton had said lay between the cemetery and the town of Gideon.
Then some kind of shudder went through the children — they were now “children” — who were holding hands with Malachi, Sam and Charlie. The attention of every one of them snapped in the same direction as perfectly as if a drill instructor had commanded an honor guard, “Eyes right!”
There was nothing there. To the right were no houses, only a steep hillside.
Then they began to move together. As they had functioned as one before, their will and intent forged again the total bond. Dropping the hands of Sam and Malachi and Charlie, they moved toward the hillside, a school of fish in perfect unison. And they changed, fluidly transformed from the shapes of children who’d “come over” to Red Rover. Though still small, each of the forms had claws and fangs and jagged teeth — and eyes that flamed.
They “flowed” up the hillside without seeming to climb it, but not seeming to float over it either. Up and up they went until they reached the top.
Then they vanished over the crest of the hill and were gone. As soon as they were no longer visible, the pressure on Malachi’s ears eased, like some struggle was over.
The black presence hadn’t gone with them, though, had remained, growing dimmer and dimmer as the children got farther away, growing uglier and angrier with every second that passed, still there, pulsing, boiling, frothing.
So full of hatred you could almost smell it.
Then the black formless mass coalesced into a single, towering form. The creature the trapper Jed Pollock had described. “A beastie twenty feet tall, teeth sharp as knives, eyes like the devil, come running at me out of the mist in the trees.”
Malachi stood almost in the middle of the street, where the line of children had extended, and he began to back up slowly until he reached where Charlie and Sam stood together cowering in horror. The creature matched his movements. As Malachi backed up, it moved forward, closing the distance between them.
It hunkered down then, low to the ground as it approached, crouching as a lion crouches when it stalks its prey, coiled strength held barely in check, preparing any half second to launch itself at them.
“Get to the car,” Malachi said to Sam and Charlie in a harsh whisper. “Get in the car and run.”
Sam merely looked at him, took his hand then and squeezed it.
“No,” she said, and stood resolutely beside him.
Shep and Claude stared in shocked disbelief at the people who was walking across that meadow toward where that fella was digging a grave in the cemetery. Shep couldn’t figure out where they’d come from. He hadn’t seen nobody in the woods on that side of the meadow — though, just like him and Claude, if they hadn’t wanted to be seen, you couldn’t have seen them. But they wasn’t hiding now, they just come walking out of the trees into the grassy meadow. Weird walking. Like walking was a hard thing for them, which didn’t make no sense, but wasn’t none of them people any good at it. They didn’t stumble or nothing, just … kinda lurched along, like that man who had something, some kind of palsy, that his mama’d slapped him upside the head for staring at that time in the grocery store.
Except these was people Shep knew and they didn’t have no palsy. There was Reece Tibbits, his wife and girls, and his mama Grace. There was the Tungates, too, Abner Riley and Ronnie’s wife, Becky Sue, who was pregnant. He didn’t know Ronnie’s mother, hadn’t seen her but one time, but he figured she was the woman walking, lurching along next to Becky Sue.
Then it occurred to Shep that every one of them people was among the ones who’d vanished. And more’n that, most of ‘em, maybe all of them, was folks who lived in them houses that’d got old all of a sudden, like his and Abby’s done. But here they was, right out here in the daylight, walking across a field, not disappeared no more.
Claude made some kind of sound, like a cough or a grunt or something and Shep turned to see him staring in that wide-eyed, unblinking stare of his at the people crossing the meadow.
“Them what you was talking about?” he asked, his voice all tight and strained. “Them as Abby said was gonna help out?”
In truth, Shep didn’t know whether they was or not, but then Abby answered with his voice, “Yeah,” so she musta been expecting ‘em.
Then he seen Jolene Rutherford leap into that red car and drive off into that field, and wasn’t but a second or two fore she hit Reece Tibbits, just run him over! Shep could hear that ugly whump sound it made when the car crashed into him. Reece flew up in the air and landed on the hood of the car and she just kept going, hitting others, aiming at ‘em, until there was an awful bam sound when she hit one of them tree stumps. She stumbled out of the car and took out running to where the men was standing in the cemetery, holding up a pick and shovel as weapons.
Claude made another sound then, a strangled sound, and when Shep turned to look at him, his mouth had dropped open, unhinged like as if his jaw was broke, and he was shaking his head back and forth real slow, a look on his face of …
Shep turned back to the meadow to see what Claude was staring at, and he almost cried out his own self.
Reece.
As Shep watched in horrified wonder, Reece Tibbits climbed down off the hood of that car, and went right on walking, same as the others.
And he didn’t have no head.
Claude liked to choked then. He jumped to his feet and began to back away, mouthing words he wasn’t saying, then he turned and high-tailed it off into the woods, crashing through the undergrowth, bulling his way through.
Shep looked down and seen that Claude had dropped his rifle in the dirt before he took out. Shep’s heart was hammering so loud he couldn’t hear nothing but the pounding sound, felt like his face was all blowed up like a balloon and blood would come squirting out when it burst. He felt like running away, too, woulda if he coulda got control of his legs so he could stand up.
Then movement caught Shep’s eye and he turned to the right to see … what?
What was that coming down the hillside from Gideon? It was — looked like a bunch of kids. They wasn’t walking funny like them folks in the field. They wasn’t walking at all, really, just moving real fast down the hill toward the cemetery and the meadow on the other side of it.
Shep stared. The closer they got, the more horrible they were. But he couldn’t stop gawking. Couldn’t breathe or think, hadn’t never in his life seen nothing so … awful. Turns out Claude had run off before the real scary stuff even showed up.
Chapter Thirty
Lester Peetree had almost forgotten how quiet the Ruger was with a suppressor to silence the gunshot. He heard only the familiar coughing sound, then watched Obie Tackett fly backward off the roof of the drug store where Judd Perkins crouched behind the facade overlooking Main Street.
He immediately swung the rifle barrel back toward the school and the porch where Neb was calling out to the crowd. He searched with the magnification of the scope the space behind Neb, between him and the school doors. Viola Tackett would move into that space any second now, and the instant he had his crosshairs fixed on her head, he would put her down.
Hers would be a kill shot. He’d opted for a body shot on Obie Tackett, likely not fatal but he’d only had seconds to sight in when he spotted Obie out the corner of his eye, stepping up off the ladder onto the roof of the building behind Judd. Obie’d been knocked off the ladder backwards. His body’d fallen straight down two stories to the concrete behind the store. If the bullet hadn’t killed him, the fall had.
There was a blur of movement behind Neb, and Lest
er could hear Viola’s voice addressing the crowd. He couldn’t see her, though. She had moved to the side of the porch instead of the front, talking to someone she saw in the crowd. The white pillar blocked Lester’s shot. He kept the crosshairs trained on the edge of the pillar. The instant Viola poked out from behind it, he’d fire.
Viola stood next to the white stone pillar, scanning the crowd while Neb got everybody to squeeze in nice and tight. As she watched, one after another of her “boys” was winnowing casually toward the outside edges of the crowd.
She was looking for … who should she pick to make the first sacrifice for her cause? Hmmmm.
Ah, there. Thelma Jackson had just turned and started to move out of her spot down front in the center of the crowd toward the back.
“You there, Thelma, c’mon back here. Where you think you’s going?”
Thelma turned back, but with an attitude. Like maybe she didn’t like taking Viola’s orders. Well, we’ll see about that.
“Come on, you can be the first to sign up.” Neb had grabbed hold of her arm and was making sure she done as she was told. He pulled her on up the steps to stand in front of Viola beside the pillar. She was a big woman, probably even taller than Sam Sheridan. A thought flashed through Viola’s mind and was gone as quickly as a comet across the night sky.
I bet Rusty’s gonna be tall when he’s a man growed — with both his mama and his daddy tall like they was.
She smiled then, brief but genuine.
Viola looked out past Thelma at the crowd. They had grown restless when Neb dragged Thelma up onto the top step, like maybe they didn’t think she’d been treated with proper respect. Viola asked ‘em if they knew Thelma, which they all did, of course. That was one reason why Viola’d picked her to be first. Wasn’t likely anybody in the county didn’t know her, or at least who she was, her being a teacher for all them years. She was well liked. Perfect choice for the first person to shoot.
